Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

This has been a fascinating evening, has it not? I wonder whether the Minister has any support. I also wonder what the Labour Party is up to, because they do not seem to be taking part at any level at all. We have had precisely two Labour speakers, and no more, one of whom is yet to speak and will undoubtedly tell us what is what.

I have a lot of sympathy for my noble friends Lord Robathan, Lady Neville-Rolfe and Lord Cormack, and I will support whichever of their proposals goes to the vote. I am sorry but this is becoming a complete shambles. We had a little family debate at the weekend about whether we should put granny by the window or whether we did not want her to get pneumonia. We decided that we wanted her not to get pneumonia, because who on earth would end up doing the washing up? When you have senior officials in the Government talking about putting granny by the window, you really know that you have lost something.

At the same time, there is a serious point here. There is a catalogue of misery within the health service of people who cannot see their relatives, of the disabled who are stranded and lonely in homes, and the NHS does not appear to care. Why do we have a Minister for vaccinating people but no Minister for sorting out the NHS—for opening hospitals, opening surgeries, and getting visitors back into homes where people have been isolated, often for months? They are not a compassionate Government; they are in the grip of a handful of so-called experts, one of whom I remember had the distinction some years ago of having half of the cattle in Britain slaughtered quite needlessly. I hope that he does not turn those latter abilities to the general population.

Last Saturday, the shroud-waver in chief, the Cabinet Minister Mr Michael Gove, told us that we would be physically overwhelmed, with

“Every bed, every ward occupied”,

and all the capacity built into the Nightingales and requisitioned from the public sector too. Let me ask this of the Minister: as of today, how many Nightingale beds are full, both as a number and as a percentage? How many of the private sector beds are full, and how many are sitting there, not taking in private sector patients because they are getting big dollops of public money—I speak from some knowledge because I have a number of friends in the medical profession—for leaving the beds empty and not taking in patients? This is the rather sad state that we are in.

What do I propose, apart from what I have said already? We need a wider view among the people who make the decisions. Why are people like Professor Heneghan and Professor Gupta voices in the wilderness? With all their scientific abilities, why are they not at least in the room where the decisions are made? They would be a small minority, but at least they would be able to put forward their views. Why are we not listening to the Chancellor and to industry? We are bankrupting the country. We are running it into debts that it will take years to pay off because we are obsessed with a handful of supposed experts—I say “supposed” because I do not think they are. I also do not think that we can continue to bankrupt the country, which is what we are doing.

I am sorry for those in the Labour Party, but their answer is always, “Give us a chequebook”, and never, “Let us sort out how to get back to normal.” That is what I want to see. I also want to see something that has been alluded to many times in the debate, which is an end to the withdrawal of civil liberties and the chip-chipping away at everything that we stand for. Let me say this: half of the people of the city I live in, which is Cambridge, do not understand the regulations. The other half who do are interpreting them in their own way—and that does not necessarily mean that they are obeying them, because many are not doing so. The Army is now involved in vaccinating people. We are beginning to look like Poland in the 1980s and we need to step back from this. Will the Minister please take tonight’s debate as a serious contribution?

Also, and finally, we must stop persecuting people. Some 45 years ago, I first met Mr Piers Corbyn. When Labour had a leader called Jeremy, people used to say, “What do you think of him?” I would always reply, “You should meet his brother.” What I will say is this: you cannot conduct society on the basis of persecuting a handful of loonies who run around demonstrating. Please stand back, think about it, calm it down, and start all over again.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and the noble Lords, Lord Shinkwin and Lord Moylan, have withdrawn so I now call the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly.